


Glass and Prisms

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 17:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finally finds a way to distract the mind of Sherlock Holmes</p><p><i>“I’m </i>bored<i>, John. We haven’t had a case in ages and I feel like my mind’s breaking into pieces, drops of mercury and they’re dancing away and scattering, losing themselves in a vacuum and everything in my head is spinning out of focus and into chaos and out of sense.” Sherlock throws himself onto the couch and continues to babble.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass and Prisms

During their last case they had crouched together behind a wall as bullets whistled in the air past them. All John could hear was his own breathing and the breathing of the man beside him coupled with the ringing of gunfire. The solid wall against his back could have easily been windworn and bleached by the desert sun. He had thought that he could taste sand in the air as he breathed slowly and calmly through his nose.

John Watson had focused on what he was holding in both hands. In one hand, he had held tightly to Sherlock’s arm because he had been afraid that the idiot would do something stupid, like run out into the bullets. Sherlock’s head had rested against the wall, dark hair falling into his face and there had been too much happiness in his face. His other hand had been tightened around his gun and it had felt like an extension of the limb instead of an addition.

He had waited for that moment of opportunity, for their assailant to pause to reload. His patience had been a cool wall of prism that had bent his concentration like light.

The moment had come and John had darted out quickly, paused only a second to aim. That moment had been dazzling, brilliant, unforgettable. He had been open and vulnerable and his arm had been completely steady, guiding the gun to the shooter like a needle on a compass. His finger had squeezed the trigger and a tremor had run through his entire body. The man was instantly killed.

He had been unable to move, breathing slowly to stop himself from laughing. Sherlock had run immediately to the corpse, long fingers running quickly over the seams of the body, finding everything his extraordinary mind needed to knit the last loose threads of the mystery together. Their eyes had met for a moment from across the distance and the world had trembled because their chests were still heaving.

That had been two weeks ago.

John sits now at his laptop and tries to piece together a story for his blog that isn’t made entirely of sense impressions and descriptions of heartbeats. He feels like a translator, trying to put his experience in words that everyone will understand. It’s never easy. He wants to talk about the feeling of steel under his hand and the glorious burn in his calves as together they ran away from gunfire. But he knows this will never do.

John digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and silently prays for another case, for both their sakes. Sherlock is lying on the couch in the same position as morning. John has been tempted several times to check the man for vital signs. He has been in his pajamas since morning, unmoving, even when John ordered takeout for dinner.

With a sigh, John shuts his laptop and gets up, thinking idly about making some tea, but instead he ends up looking down at Sherlock. His fingers are wrapped in bandages because two days ago he became so frustrated with an experiment that he smashed his beaker, cutting the tips of his fingers with shards of glass.

John didn’t even notice until he saw the blood on his laptop’s keyboard, red fingerprints on the spacebar and the shift key and three-quarters of the alphabet as well. The backspace key, especially, looked like its very own crime scene.

He had chased down Sherlock with a box of bandages, finally cornering him between the kitchen table and the fridge. Sherlock’s fingers were thankfully free of glass, and after covering them in bandages, John let him go to sulk. He had gone about wiping the blood off his laptop, trying not to think about how easily he could have licked off the blood and soothed the cuts with his tongue.

John’s eyes leave Sherlock’s fingers, which are loosely curled around the hem of his shirt, to travel up to Sherlock’s face. He looks like he is sleeping but John can never tell. He shakes his head and goes to the kitchen to make tea after all. The routine of tea leaves into boiling hot water is something he knows as well as reloading a gun.

“John?” Sherlock’s voice calls.

“Mm?” John says as he roots around for a mug that isn’t growing anything living.

“Bored,” Sherlock sighs from the living room.

John doesn’t reply, keeps going about making tea until he hears the shift of fabric. When he looks around the kitchen wall, Sherlock has left the couch.

John abruptly sets everything down and runs to his room. Sherlock has found his gun, even though he hid it very carefully this time.

“What the hell are you doing?” John fumes, making to wrest the gun away, but Sherlock is too quick for him. He slips past him back down to the living room. John catches him this time, taking the gun and shaking out the bullets. The bastard had taken the safety off.

“Bloody hell, Sherlock, you can’t just grab my gun every time you get bored,” John breathes, voice gone still with anger.

Sherlock makes a noise like a miserable child, pulling at his hair with dramatic agony, fingers knotting in the curls. His eyes are bright and blue and wild.

“I’m _bored_ , John. We haven’t had a case in ages and I feel like my mind’s breaking into pieces, drops of mercury and they’re dancing away and scattering, losing themselves in a vacuum and everything in my head is spinning out of focus and into chaos and out of sense.” Sherlock throws himself onto the couch and continues to babble.

John quickly stows the gun away and then goes to Sherlock, crouching in front of him. Sherlock’s fingers are still fisted in his hair. John rests his hand on Sherlock’s forehead which is wrinkled in disgust and frustration. His fingers find pressure of their own and slowly Sherlock’s face smooths into relative calm once more.

“Violin?” John asks quietly.

“Inadequate,” Sherlock answers immediately, his face barely moving. Somehow John knows that Sherlock is focusing his concentration on the feeling of John’s fingertips, like John had done with his gun. A prism bending light.

“The morgue tomorrow morning?” John asks, fingers rubbing at the space between Sherlock’s eyebrows as he hopes fervently that Molly has at least a semi-interesting corpse on hand.

“Not soon enough,” Sherlock says, and before he can suggest breaking into the morgue in the middle of the night, John quickly suggests something else.

“How about continuing one of your experiments?” John asks.

Sherlock’s eyes open and he fixes John with a glare. “Don’t be stupid,” he snarls.

“A test then,” John says archly, and he is rewarded by the spark of interest in Sherlock’s eyes.

John is thinking wildly. “A test. For your deductions. I’ll go out for half an hour, come back, and you have to tell exactly where I’ve been. You do it with the corpses all the time, tell what streets they’ve been walking on by the dust on their shoes, that sort of thing?” John finishes his explanation, watching Sherlock desparately. If this doesn’t work, he will have no way of calming him down.

Sherlock sniffs and turns his face into the couch. “Fine. Be interesting though,” his voice comes, muffled.

John gets his coat and leaves, making sure to be very quiet as he’s walking past Mrs. Hudson’s door. He stands in the street for a moment, thinking furiously about where he should go, how best to fool Sherlock Holmes.

He pushes away the thought that there is no way he can possibly outrun the man’s mind. It’s like a sprint against a racehorse and he’s a packmule. But it’s too late to back out now. His breath is steaming and he can feel his nose going red. But he shoves his fists into his pockets and runs down the dark city streets.

When he comes back into 221B Baker Street, Sherlock gets to his feet like fluid, eyes running over John, taking in the details and the hints. He only touches John once, to move aside the collar of John’s coat to study the other side. That is all he needs.

Sherlock’s eyes find John’s and there is disappointment there. “Too easy,” he says, and begins to methodically list every street and corner that John went on, down to the approximate amount of time he spent in each one. He is cold and accurate and it infuriates John and makes him want to prove him wrong.

“And then you had a conversation with that shopgirl before coming back home. You should have gotten her number, at least then this night would be somewhat fruitful,” Sherlock finishes, throwing himself back into stillness on the couch.

John takes a deep breath. “Give me an hour,” he says slowly because really, there is no longer any chance of him getting any sleep tonight. This time, he makes sure to take all the bullets with him, stuffing them into his pocket, because he is no longer sure he can divert Sherlock’s attention for an hour.

Soon he is walking through the cold night again, a plan churning in his mind. He watches everything closely, where he walks and how long he stands. He shifts his scarf so that his nose is exposed and he can breathe in the smells. Because London is fragrant and London is putrid and he knows that when he walks through it the smell will settle into his skin and into his hair.

In the end he spends more than an hour. It feels like a mad game of hide and seek. When he comes back, Sherlock gets to his feet, more slowly this time, as if it pains him to do so. But as soon as his eyes fixate on John, eyes darting for details, his expression slowly fixes itself into a familiar one, the one he wears to crime scenes.

“John,” Sherlock says simply, coming closer. John stands still as Sherlock walks around him, his eyes taking in everything. John is finding it hard to breathe because this is intoxicating, being under those blue eyes for so long. It’s heady.

“Lie down,” Sherlock tells him.

“What?” John says quickly, feeling consternation when he realizes that his knees are already half bent.

“Like a corpse,” Sherlock says impatiently, his hands already pushing John to the couch. John lies down and takes a deep breath to steady himself.

“Stop that,” Sherlock says.

“Stop _breathing_?” John chokes out because for some reason it still feels like there isn’t enough oxygen getting to his brain.

“Not so loudly. And close your eyes. Honestly, don’t you even know what corpses _look_ like.”

John swallows a retort and clamps his mouth and eyes shut, beginning to breathe slowly through his nose. Sherlock’s fingers begin to shift over him. The touch is so glancing and light that he barely feels it, but it still makes him want to shiver. It is all he can do to keep still and not fidget.

Sherlock mutters to himself under his breath, theories and conjectures. In a way, John feels like he isn’t even there, that he has just become another soulless object under Sherlock’s scrutiny.

“Where have you been,” Sherlock says quietly. John knows that he is not to answer. His breath catches in his throat because he knows that Sherlock is very close, that his face is probably mere inches from his. He wishes he could open his eyes, and his eyelids flutter against his will. John hopes that Sherlock hasn’t noticed the slip.

“Oh, John, you smell like her, you smell like _London_.” And suddenly Sherlock’s whole hand is pressing down on John’s chest as the man leans forward to bury his face into the crook of John’s neck. Sherlock’s nose finds John’s skin there and he just _breathes_.

“You smell like you’ve soaked her into your pores and she’s living inside you and you’ve breathed her in and you’re exhaling her right now,” Sherlock’s voice is deep and low and quiet, and John is baffled by how the vibrations have the power to make his entire body shudder with feeling and _want_.

“You smell like London is in your bones, like you’ve been swimming through her and she’s wrapped you in her arms,” Sherlock continues, even as his arms find their way around John’s shoulders so that slowly, Sherlock rests his long lenth flush with John’s body, continuing to breathe him in and speak into his skin.

John’s breath is shaky and so is his voice. “Shut up, Sherlock,” he says, and he turns his head to stop Sherlock’s lips with his own.

They’re both breathing too hard. Sherlock’s mouth opens to John’s and their tongues find each other. Sherlock’s tongue is moving strangely and John realizes that Sherlock is still trying to talk, still trying to describe the London he found in John’s skin. He’s saying something about John gathering the beads of mercury and he isn’t making sense, so John shifts them so that he’s straddling Sherlock’s hips, his mouth taking over Sherlock’s until Sherlock is moving with him, no longer trying to speak.

John feels the prism again, and this time his concentration is being focused on several points at once. One, their mouths connected and sliding against each other. Two and three, Sherlock’s hands spread against his hips. Four, his own fingers curled into Sherlock's hair. Five, the feeling of Sherlock underneath him, warm and thrumming and reacting like acid and water. 

They break apart and breath each other, faces inches apart.

“What about this?” John asks, a grin looping the sides of his mouth up. He enjoys this look on Sherlock, lips kiss-swollen, cheeks flushed. The blue eyes are wild again and the sight only makes John feel more like kissing him.

“This?” Sherlock says slowly, his tongue darting out to run over his lips, as if he’s tasting John there. “Adequate,” Sherlock says, and there is a challenge there to be better.

So John buries himself back into Sherlock and he doesn’t complain anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at my [tumblr](http://orcsies.tumblr.com/).


End file.
